s p a c i o u s n e s s
some musings on "healing" which we should really be calling repair
Welcome to Amused. I share musings on musing and being amused, even in the face of great horror and even great pleasure. You’re welcome to pay me for my contribution to this earthly realm or simply follow along. Most of my work is free, some is not. Feel free to stay a while or run far in the other direction. Nonetheless, thanks for stopping by.
A quick note before I dive into today’s thought pond…
After some serious weighing as to whether or not I’d made a silly “mistake”, I’m actually rather amused with myself for having turned off the ability to comment on/like my writing. Currently, I find it rather pleasurable to barf the vomit of my heart upon the page, hit send, and then go about my day not awaiting anything—a response/its approval/if it resonates. For now, I’m not making any of that my business, which has freed up my energy for my own business and other business more generally.
I’m ready to expand into broader writing projects outside of this substack, ones I share in person and that I post (with literal paper) around the city. I’ve let this platform trick me into thinking I need to put all my eggs in its basket to achieve some sense of relevance, when really, ever since I was a wee child it’s more authentically me to scatter my eggs all about the enchanted forest, then go look for them, one by one.
What is relevance but a basket of fragile eggs in the hand of a child?
S p a c i o u s n e s s is the larger project of my life right now.
Believe it or not, s p a c e requires certain parameters, or perhaps more accurately stated—the ability to know when to set things down. It’s been inviting me into its void for some time. I’m realizing it’s why I recently left my last salon (which I loved) for my current salon (which I also love). The new s p a c e possesses not just more physical space, but more room for autonomy in my career. The formula:
x =
I had to set down the expectations of a boss (who I adored) so I could authentically meet the needs this chapter of my life is calling for. Less. is the title—not more. I could even say it’s really about enough—learning how it feels and how to honor it. To really allow enough to fill the capacity of each of my limbs, not a fingernail more. It’s also about agency over ethics, or perhaps agency as ethics. To make decisions and live with them regardless of whether they turn out to be “right” or “wrong”. This means I am not utilitarian, perhaps I’m an ethical egoist or a deontologist, but probably none of the above. I like to think I’m creating my own branch on the philosophical tree.
Part of this s p a c i o u s n e s s project includes a newfound breathwork practice which made its way to me a few months ago, mostly incidentally. Whatever grace of godd allowed it upon my path, I am forever grateful and totally hooked. Its affects have been life altering after only three group sessions; two with Debbie (@funhealseverything on insta) and one at Maharose in Cobble Hill1. Each time I’m guided by a beautiful, embodied woman to a s p a c e within myself so lusciously deep and loving and mysterious, I don’t want to leave. This practice is teaching me that godd2 and my healing are never off in the distance, but right precisely inside of myself.
It has me questioning why I spend most nights “winding down” with the sex and the city reboot (again, jesus christ) when I could be winding down with the sweet and melty core of my nothingness? Who knows? Well I think I do… Many of us in modernity struggle with getting to and resting in our strange nothingness. Some of us don’t even dare to venture to our depths at all, which makes sense since we’re taught to fear them. It’s counter to the life we’ve been taught is life; the bright lights, sounds, and oh so many distractions are rather addictive. The great nothingness within is the poetic outlaw: soft, dark, quiet; no hide ~ no seek, no give ~ no take. If only we could come to understand that although these realms of something and nothing are different, they are in no way separate or at odds. They are not dueling to win. They just… are.
I’m so moved by the experiences I’ve had in these few sessions that for my sociology class I’m writing my thesis on the importance of breathwork and quality time spent in nature as a practice of re-communion and anxiety relief as humanity navigates the many fronts of potential collapse. If “collapse” is too heavy a word for you, let’s say: “the many fronts of a world that is perpetually rearranging itself and will stop for no one.” I hope I impress my professor with my words, I want to write something impeccable. I pray it might reach some people who would benefit from it. I’ll certainly be sharing here. Meanwhile, I can’t wait to embark on a deeper journey with my own breathing practice and to potentially become a practitioner of breathwork myself. Maybe even reiki, too! I’m all in baby—the name of the game is s p a c e and I want to be a luscious, loving curator of it.
I’m coming to learn that s p a c e (more than anything else) is what’s been most healing for me—but not because it tries to be. This is important to note. S p a c e is quite the opposite of trying/effort. According to me, a most glorious and holy dipshit, the heavy lifting of healing happens when I stop laser focusing on trying to heal. I’ve been thinking of it this way: if my bone were to break, I wouldn’t spend an hour every week poking and prodding it, reliving how it happened and beating the shit out of why it did in the first place. Instead, I’d set the bone back in place (hopefully by a learned doctor), apply the proper support structure, then do my best to leave it alone. In fact the real job becomes not touching it, bumping it, or using it for a series of weeks so it can “heal”. A bone does not heal with our conscious mind and the bone does not heal itself by itself—the whole body does it’s bodily thing to heal. It is a joint affair.
Earlier this year I felt moved to graduate myself from talk therapy into somatics. Now I question how I ever did therapy without including the movement and presence of my beloved body. I have a wonderful guide, V, who once a month explores my body and voice and joy and pain with me. At our recent session, she guided me to simply walk across the room as she pointed out how my bones and muscles move in all kinds of contradictory ways in order for me to be able to do so. “Woahhhh,” I said. “It’s like there’s contradiction in our very bodies.” “Not like” she said, “literally.”
There is a difference between breaking a bone and having our emotional body wounded, obviously, just as there are varying intensities of trauma. Some might say the bone is a matter of matter and our feelings about such things are a matter of phenomena. But I’m not making that distinction here—it’s all the same body, the same organism, with it’s cohesive yet contradictory systems: soul~mind~body. I do not claim that mental “trauma” and physical trauma ought to be treated exactly the same. But I do think that hyper-focusing on only our mental wounds without including the body, or inversely, only looking at the body without the mental-ness will leave us perpetually incomplete. Healing bones and healing the ghosts of broken bones may require specific care, after all—a bone can notably, fully heal whereas a ghost can reappear long after turning on all the lights. Nonetheless, these realms of hurt share some overlap in order to repair—they need focus and then they need to be left alone. Without leaving ourselves alone from time to time, we signal to our bodies that we don’t trust the inner workings to do their magic3.
The quality of our (conscious) focus is inherently fixating; it seeks to resolve. This is a useful mode of consciousness. It helps us do math, achieve tasks, and make utility of this mystery funhouse world we live in. But it’s not meant to be applied everywhere to everything all of the time, much less our “trauma”—certainly not for great lengths of time. Even the words “trauma” and “healing” are so convoluted due to this strict focus, it seems we’ve lost touch with their original meaning. They are no longer grounded in reality, we have ripped them from the soil and carry them around like little pets instead of embodying them so they might revegetate.
Just the other day, I caught a small clip of Amanda Nguyen after her recent 11 minute departure to space and back. Buzzy and emotional from her kiss with space, the interviewer was asking her about her claim that she needed to go to space to heal. Which when I heard, I damn near spit my coffee out in laughter. Is this not the most absurd, elite shit you have ever heard? I said out loud to no one. No sooner I found myself joyously critiquing her need to heal in space on insta—apparently it resonated. However, in coming to write this today, I revisited the little snippet of what I’d heard from her and learned the larger context of what she was trying to heal from, which is sexual assault. A decade or so ago she was considering focusing her studies so that she could end up at NASA, then the assault happened. This shifted her entire trajectory towards helping sexual assault survivors and the legislation surrounding it—which is honestly incredible4. Her return to space was not just about going to outer space, but returning to the woman she was before her assault. She did it for her, she did it for all survivors. Or so she says. For a moment I almost felt bad about my critique, but then I remembered she took a Jeff Bezos jet to space “to heal”, and decided to ponder further what this situation might say about the broader conversation of healing and our rightful allergy to our worldly trauma.
Nguyen isn’t alone in wanting to go far, far away to heal, many of us have undergone journey’s of seeking our own resolve that end up casting us back and forth like a fishing line, sometimes finding relief, sometimes more pain. Sometimes this is for physical pain, sometimes mental, and many times both. I can’t help but wonder if on some subconscious level we blame the earth for all our pain, causing us to seek out otherworldly realms of healing? And while this is understandable, is this not just another way to further “sever” ourselves from the earth? The nature that we are, that we belong to, doesn’t just heal and give—nature also wounds and kills. I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit I too have tried far out things to heal, even to this day. But sometimes what I did to heal was just another bargain for escape.
Nguyen, like me and like many of you, belong to a culture that says in order to heal, we must follow a series of steps and /or seek something out there that will make it happen: a guru/therapist, an assessment, a substance, a retreat. Sometimes these things do bring us healing, but I don’t think it’s the things themselves necessarily—I think it also has to with our very desire to seek connection in order that we might heal. Seldom are we taught or told that healing can begin in our own backyard, in our own body, with our own breath.
Ironically, even as I made fun of Nguyen for needing “space to heal”, I actually totally, utterly agree that we all do need space to heal. But not necessarily the space above our atmosphere—just space, s p a c e. Room. Rest. Relaxation. In fact it’s what I believe is majorly missing from the healing/trauma conversation. And it makes sense since these seemingly very simple luxuries are not granted to everyone, not equally. That indeed in this fast paced, exploited world that is exactly what they are—luxuries. For those of us who have the great privilege of cultivating genuine s p a c e, genuine time for nothing—I encourage us to drink from and bathe in it. To make this our holy grail and wishing well. Because new trauma is being blasted upon the world every day, some of us are being directly impacted while the rest of us watch like cows awaiting slaughter. Others are completely aloof. And some other others even think it could never happen to them—I hope they are right. I mean seriously… how do we heal a world that simultaneously feels like a gaping, gushing wound?
You could ask a body. Your own even. The most fundamental process of a body is to heal itself, and by heal what I really mean is repair. What is healing but continually repairing? It’s not not experiencing pain and suffering, rather it’s processing, mending, and renewing our pain and suffering and yes our joy, too. “Healing”, a ghost word at this point, seems to promise some sort of purist return to who we were before the damage, whereas “repair” includes the damage. The body knows repair like the sun knows the moon. This is what a body does so long as it is alive, and then eventually it dies, and there is no healing and no repair known to man that will stop this. Death is right there, embedded in the code of life, swimming round and round in it’s pond. Isn’t that wild? The paradox winks at us from the garden. Everything on earth is inherently capable of healing itself and everything on earth is going to die. We are part of this earth and are no exception to these rules. And this is the good news, healing can be so simple because it’s not really about not dying or being totally “fixed”, not even pain free, but about living as well as one can with what they’re given and able to create. This means healing isn’t really about adding 10,000 things on top of ourselves or getting back to who we were before the damage was done—it’s about re-familiarizing ourselves with the basics.
Healing is really just the process of repair, a process so fundamental to life it’s almost absurd we could think otherwise.
I know we like to think we need a lot, it’s been pounded into our skulls since we were wee ones. And I won’t deny that seeking our healing may be the only way to find it, no matter how far we have to go for it and how many times it doesn’t quite work. But might I offer to anyone who isn’t in an actual emergency and who is open enough to receiving it, that there is bioavailable healing that requires no money and it can begin today. It is primarily about cultivating communal belonging, getting enough vitamins and minerals from our food, drinking enough clean water, laying off harmful substances as much as possible, and moving our bodies to keep joints lubricated and organs functioning. I won’t speak on behalf of everyone, but for many of us healing (aka repair) is not rocket science. And anyone who makes healing into rocket science might be making the poison, too.
If we can’t heal in our own backyards, then we won’t be able to “heal” anywhere, much less outer space. I’m not arguing against healing, of course, or that I know what is right or wrong for you or anyone else, but I do believe healing is more accessible than we in the United States are so often led to believe that it is.
The first rule of repair club is that we can’t do it alone.
None of my repair happened without the communion of others, whether they be therapists, authors of books, or trusted and supportive friends and lovers. In fact, it was the whole combo. Which is what’s also lacking in the conversation: there isn’t just one thing that repairs, it’s a joint affair. A communion. Repair can only happen together. And while it does require focus, so too it must be set down—which is just as important. None of this happens in linear steps, but winds like a spiral staircase to heaven.
Going to therapy and talking about our pains can be wonderful and it can even be fun. But there is also healing in simply lying under a tree in the warmth of the sun while listening to the birds chirping above. Quieting the chatter in our minds. Reading a book in a lovers lap. Or in catching up with a best friend over the phone. These are free. Their healing/repair abundance is bio-available, and offer us tried and true pathways back to our true home (the core inside our very selves/very cells) instead of the consumerist, bullshit space mission we’ve been told is what we need to heal.
I don’t need to leave earth to repair the wounds she gave me—though I honor the urge to. Truth is, I don’t have to go far to get to space at all. I am s p a c e.
Email me if you have more questions, I’ll be writing more about these experiences soon.
“God” is no longer gob, they are now godd (with two d’s). Not sure why exactly, other than godd changes cause godd is change, and the godd I refer to is never the biblical “god” because godd is not an entity, much less a male entity, hovering above me but is double d’d deep inside of me.
Obviously various disease and illness and brokenness require different care and attention for different periods of time, I’m not denying this. Mostly just speaking of my own experience.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/amanda-nguyen-becomes-1st-vietnamese-woman-to-fly-to-space-this-journey-really-is-about-healing-video